


Dreamers by day

by jauneclair



Series: All men dream [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: (present in spirit), Characters not appearing in this tale: John Silver, Early s4, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Kissing, M/M, Madi and Flint think Silver is dead, flint pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 12:05:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12132123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jauneclair/pseuds/jauneclair
Summary: Sitting in a square of moonlight from one of the open windows, her face upturned, the light painting beautiful silver streaks on her forehead, cheekbones, lips.He stopped. He thought of looking through another window, at another woman, in another time.Flint and Madi: there's a void shared between them, and it pulls them together.





	Dreamers by day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lacecat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lacecat/gifts).



> Dedicating this one to @jamesbarlow - I'm not sure if this is AT ALL what you envisioned, but thanks for kicking me into to gear to actually write it :)

Flint had set Joji and Dooley on shifts, to keep a lookout for Billy's men, and was trooping back up the hill when he saw her in the ruins of the house. Sitting in a square of moonlight from one of the open windows, her face upturned, the light painting beautiful silver streaks on her forehead, cheekbones, lips.

He stopped. He thought of looking through another window, at another woman, in another time.

Madi turned and looked back at him, tilting her head, and the memory evaporated. The feeling did not. The warmth in his gut churned into that sea of his regret.

Flint kept moving up the hill. Kofi, leaning against the wall a few feet away, stirred towards him, but then Madi cleared her throat and gave Kofi a nod. The other man stood there for a moment, arms folded across his chest, as he and Madi shared a long look. Kofi was the one to turn away - he grunted, standing aside to let Flint pass. Flint waited for a moment, watching Kofi withdraw down the hill to the border of their makeshift campsite.

Madi raised her chin at him. She wouldn't waste words to beckon him closer.

Flint removed his coat and settled down a few feet from her, in one of the shadowed corners of the house. The weeds sprouting between the cracks in the mortar teased the base of his neck as he leaned back against the wall. He needed it to hold him up for just a moment. The weariness that tugged at his bones was greater he'd ever admit to aloud. Growing ever since - ever since -

"What are you thinking of?"

Madi's voice broke through the dark curtain of his thoughts. He opened his eyes, not realizing he'd closed them, and looked at Madi in her pool of moonlight.

"I'm thinking," he said, swallowing the lump in his throat, "that we should both get some sleep, given the multitude and magnitude of dangers and difficult decisions that we will face tomorrow."

His mind should have been filled with plans - plans about Nassau, plans about Billy - but now all he could think was that they were probably sharing one singular thought.

Madi slid closer to him. Her fingers skimmed over the folds of his shirt where the fabric billowed around his upper arm. Only half her face was lit by the moon, now, as she looked up at him. Usually her eyes were hard when they looked at him. He was used to that. Nearly everyone looked at him that way, if they dared to meet his eyes; it didn't discomfit him in the slightest. But the way she looked at him now - with her eyes crinkling around the corners - wasn't usual. There was only one person in the last few months that looked at him that way.

That lump lodged itself in his throat again.

"I think you may be correct," Madi said, her voice barely more than a whisper, "but what if sleep brings no relief? Last night - I dreamed of all those faces beneath the water."

"Sleep can bring its own special torments," he admitted, just as quietly as she. He didn't know why they had both taken to whispering: they were alone up here, in the shadows of the ruined walls. "Night terrors. They can make the mundane terrifying, and the terrifying mundane."

"I see I have much to look forward to," Madi said. Her small hand closed around his bicep, squeezing gently. "What would you rather dream of: the battle, or what you lost in it?"

"What _I_ lost in it?" he echoed.

She squeezed his arm again. The touch felt hot as a brand against his skin, even through the fabric, but he had no instinct to recoil. "What we lost. You said he was your friend, too, did you not?"

"Yes." Flint looked down to where her hand wrapped around his arm because he couldn't look at her eyes. The next words he forced out from between his teeth. "But he was more than your friend."

"Yes." Madi's free hand curved around to cup his cheek, pull his face towards hers. She ran her thumb over the coarse hairs on the side of his face and he couldn't suppress a sigh. "And so with you."

If Silver had been the only thing Flint had left, besides this war, to tether him to this world, then Madi was the last piece he had left of Silver. He wanted to cling to her, for a little while; and maybe she wished to do the same with him. But the window of his mind splintered like glass against the blows of battle, exhaustion, grief: his thoughts unspooling, and no one there to piece him back together, in time for him to figure out why Madi stared at him so, eyes not hard stones but dark embers with twin hearts of fire.

His head couldn't quite keep up, not while it was spinning so; not when Madi started kissing him so.

So tenderly.

It had been a while, a long while, since anyone had kissed him, since he'd let anyone kiss him; and Madi's lips were so soft, and her hands so gentle, holding his face, that he let himself sigh into it and turn to fully meet her kiss.

Was it really Flint that she was kissing, he wondered. Was it Flint's beard that brushed against her chin as he nosed into the kiss, or another (darker, wilder). Was it Flint's lip she nibbled at, and Madi's mouth he growled back into? Did -- growl like that, when Madi kissed him last? If Flint had ever dared to kiss him, would he have made the same sounds?  
  
Was it his mouth that Madi imagined she tasted, when Flint was also trying to chase the taste of him, vainly, foolishly, before they pulled apart.

The lines on Madi's brow were sunk deeper than before.

"I'm sorry," he said. He wasn't one to comfort. God only knew how he tried with Miranda, for years, and how spectacularly he had failed.

"No, I am sorry," she said. "It was unwanted."

"It was a good kiss," Flint said and gave her another, dropped to the center of her forehead. "But I meant it when I said earlier that we should sleep."

She acquiesced; and he took his coat and spread it out over the ground for her, in that patch of moon. By unspoken accord, he remained beside her.

"I don't think he wanted this war," she said, her back to him, once she had settled down on his coat. Flint sat again with his back to the stone wall, letting his chest rise and fall, trying to dispel the tempest in his mind. Sleep brought a fresh chorus of torments each night, that was true, but he desperately wanted to forestall this conversation to a time and place where his mind wasn't raw and his heart wasn't aching. "I don't think he wanted anything but to be your partner, and then mine. So you are my partner now. In whatever sense of the word you wish."

"Then we will be partners," Flint said quietly. "And we will _win._ "

Madi didn't speak again. Flint stayed there, resting against the wall, even when Kofi returned and made sure Madi was sleeping. His conviction allowed no shred of doubt to remain in him, that he would not be able to fulfill his commitment to her. And he was well-versed, by now, in waging wars in the names of those he had lost.

**Author's Note:**

> " _All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible._ " -- T.E. Lawrence


End file.
